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A New Western Way Of War?

French military trench warfare defense systems illustrated by Louis Bombled (1862-1927).

A New Western Way Of War?

Solving the tactical paradox of 21st century warfare.

By

Harry Halem is a senior fellow at the Yorktown Institute. He holds an M.A. in Philosophy and International Relations from the University of St. Andrews and an M.Sc. in Political Philosophy from the London School of Economics.

Autonomous Systems and Maneuver Warfare

A quarter of the way through the 21st century, it is now clear that robotic war at scale is key to prevailing in armed conflict.

In Ukraine, Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) are now a defining feature of the battlefield: both sides produce millions annually, and both sides lose thousands daily.  Yet, despite ubiquitous employment of UAS in that war, it is unclear whether Western militaries, especially the American military, will be able to employ them at comparable scale. A key question appears to be how UAS can contribute to the sort of ground war the United States and its allies have preferred to fight, that is, offensive maneuver warfare.

Addressing this question is critical, because there is every reason to believe America’s adversaries will make use of large-scale UAS deployment in a peer-to-peer fight. However unsatisfying, the answer may well be that drones are now table stakes for any nation-state that engages in war.

Ukraine is, once again, illustrative.

The front line in Ukraine has remained largely static for nearly three years. The last major territorial shift occurred in November 2022, when Ukraine recaptured right-bank Kherson Oblast and Kherson City. Since then, multiple large-scale offensive operations have provided only limited territorial gains. Even when achieved, these gains come at extraordinary cost and after months of vicious combat. Consider that it took Russia four months of high-intensity combat (and a year of sporadic fighting) to capture Avdiivka in February 2024.  In the year since, Russian troops managed to crawl just 30 miles further, to the northwest, but they have yet to take Pokrovsk, the target of their offensive operations since the summer of 2024.

Apart from the fluid opening weeks of the war, only two rapid advances have occurred, both by Ukrainian forces: the September 2022 Kharkiv Offensive and the August 2024 Kursk Offensive. During the former, Ukrainian units outran their logistics, a standard difficulty during mechanized operations.1 During the latter, Ukrainian units were too light to maintain their momentum driving into Russia.2 Otherwise, Ukraine and Russia have fought a war over bloody inches, in a manner cosmetically reminiscent of the First World War’s trench stalemate, where the attacker pays an extreme blood price for any ground taken.

This stalemate, or more precisely, this war’s positional characteristics and limited prospects for maneuver, stems partly from mutual incapacity. Ukraine’s manpower shortage and non-standardized armored fleet makes an offensive difficult to design. More fundamentally, it lacks well-trained staff officers and other technical specialists who can coordinate large-scale units concurrently.

Similarly, Russia has remained on the offensive since September 2023, but the sheer attrition it has taken has reduced its ability to execute, let alone exploit, an operational breakthrough. Considering high armored vehicle losses, Russian forces have resorted first to using thin-skinned trucks, and more recently scooters and motorbikes to push soldiers forward, hoping Ukrainian forces will not waste a mortar round or first-person view (FPV) strike drone on an individual infantryman.3 Although many of these assault troops are killed, enough get through, over hours or days of attacks, to form a critical mass and storm a Ukrainian position. These tactics are effective, but they do not enable a breakthrough.

This recognition of mutual incapacity, or at least mutual operational limitations, contrasts with the more typical explanation for limited maneuver in the Ukraine War, which is the now-transparent battlefield. Under this more common reading, the proliferation of UAS, combined with space-based surveillance and sophisticated reconnaissance aircraft, has made concealment nearly impossible.4 Once detected, a target is liable to be killed. Hence survival requires rapid movement from point to point, for artillery termed “shoot-and-scoot” tactics.5

This is often as far as UAS commentary goes. It should go much farther, because the empirical reality – and thus the lesson for the United States and its allies – is more nuanced. Defenders can combine surveillance capacity with traditional obstacles – anti-tank and anti-personnel mines, vehicle obstacles, barbed wire, etc. – to fix an attacking unit, precisely identify it, and concentrate firepower against it, whether FPV strike drones, bomber UAS, mortars, or UAS-directed artillery.6 However, attackers can also adapt. For Russia in particular, the proliferation of FPV strike drones, increasingly wire-controlled to mitigate interference, allows the attacker to hit identified defenders once they respond to assault infantry.7 The result is a need for the defender to dig in, creating hardened independent fighting positions stretching back up to 20 kilometers from the contact line, and doing the same for self-propelled artillery, the apparent practitioners of “shoot-and-scoot” tactics.8

Returning to the First World War, ironically, does help here. In 1914-1918, the key problem for both sides was the balance between mass and detection. Once the trench lines settled in Western Europe, both sides built increasingly sophisticated field fortifications that demanded ever increasing quantities of men and materiel to break. But early aircraft—and reliance on rail, rather than motorized transport—meant the attacker was largely deprived of surprise or the ability to drive into enemy depth. A combination of large-scale sequenced offensives and infiltration tactics restored surprise, while motorized transport ultimately enabled exploitation, restoring maneuver.

Akin to the Western Front, the Ukraine War’s key tactical paradox is again between mass and detection.9 Going on the attack requires large volumes of fire to create enough time for infantry units to close with the enemy – and for sappers and engineers to neutralize enemy mines and other obstacles.10 But concentrating offensive units at enough scale for a breakthrough reveals them to the enemy. Crucially, modern strike UAS move fast enough to concentrate rapidly against a potential breakthrough.

These characteristics can also apply on the offensive. Ukrainian and Russian use of FPV strike drones demonstrates the ability for specific offensive tactical actions despite heavy surveillance. Moreover, given their tactical speed, drones can be massed very quickly. Given their size, they can be forward deployed effectively, and activated only when an attack begins – like Ukraine demonstrated with its attacks on Russian strategic aviation. Drones can thus provide rapidly-concentrated mass for an attack.

However, neither side can generate the mass needed to truly suppress and destroy defending units quickly because of control constraints. Although both militaries employ AI to guide UAS and process data, drone operators remain at a premium: the public data indicates a marked difference in effectiveness between an experienced and novice drone operator for almost any mission.11 An offensive breakthrough would require several thousand drones to be massed very quickly, perhaps in under a half-hour to achieve surprise. Ukraine’s “Drone Line” concentrates several thousand highly experienced operators, allowing them to employ several thousand drones during several days of combat.12 But it may take artificial intelligence to synchronize an attack in such a short time.

There is a much more fluid interaction than publicly appreciated between offense and defense, at least at the tactical level.  Although there is not yet any resolution to the question of large-scale maneuver, we can see how the question might be resolved.

The United States is highly unlikely to fight a positional war that resembles the one in Ukraine. The American military, much like a number of other NATO militaries, has a large-scale staff system, along with training centers for additional staff personnel. (These centers have not been utilized properly to support the Ukrainian military, and their impact would be greater than the highly uneven basic training Ukrainians get in Germany, France, and the UK.13)

Ukraine makes it evident that large-scale robotic warfare, particularly the kind involving the widespread use of UAS, will remain fundamental to success in modern conflicts. Just as evident, however, is that effective use of drones must be supported with organizational adaptation and training. For the United States and its allies, the challenge here is not only in the development and mass production of these new technologies, but in seamless integration into existing military strategy. The field manual is still being written.

  1. Isabelle Khurshudyan, Paul Sonne, Serhiy Morgunov, and Kamila Hrabchuk, “Inside the Ukrainian counteroffensive that shocked Putin and reshaped the war,” Washington Post, December 29, 2022. ↩︎
  2. Olga Kyrylenko, Roman Romanyuk, Rustem Khalilov, Yevhen Rudenko, “Syrsky Raid. How is the Defense Forces’ offensive progressing in the Kursk region and what to expect next?”, Ukrainian Truth, August 14th, 2024; Olga Kyrylenko, “‘We will receive maximum resistance in Kursk.’ The Kursk operation through the eyes of three fighters,” Ukrainian Truth, August 22, 2024. ↩︎
  3. David Axe, “Sometimes Russia’s Motorcycle Assaults Actually Work—And Russian Regiments Advance A Short Distance,” Forbes, May 5, 2025. ↩︎
  4. David Johnson, “Ending the Ideology of the Offense, Part II,” War on the Rocks, August 25, 2022; Franz-Stefan Gady, “How an Army of Drones Changed the Battlefield in Ukraine,” Foreign Policy, December 6, 2023. ↩︎
  5. Rudy Ruitenberg, “In Ukraine, ‘shoot-and-scoot’ tactics helping Caesars survive,” Defense News, April 2, 2024. ↩︎
  6. See Valerii Zaluzhny, “Modern Positional Warfare and How to Win It,” November, 2023. ↩︎
  7. Howard Altman, “Inside Ukraine’s Fiber-Optic Drone War,” The War Zone, May 28, 2025. ↩︎
  8. Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds, Tactical Developments During the Third Year of the Russo-Ukrainian War (RUSI, February 2025). ↩︎
  9. Mykhaylo Zabrodskyi, Jack Watling, Oleksandr V Danylyuk and Nick Reynolds, Preliminary Lessons in Conventional Warfighting from Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: February-July 2022 (RUSI, November 2022), 62. ↩︎
  10. Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds, Stormbreak: Fighting Through Russia’s Defences in Ukraine’s 2023 Offensive (RUSI, September 2023), 15-17. ↩︎
  11. Stacie Pettyjohn, Evolution Not Revolution: Drone Warfare in Russia’s 2022 Invasion of Ukraine (CNAS, February 2024), 25-30. ↩︎
  12. David Kirichenko, “Ukraine’s Drone Forces Are Ready for Russia’s Spring Offensive,” The National Interest, April 23rd, 2025. ↩︎
  13. For the most sophisticated explication of this argument, see William F. Owen, “The False Lessons of Modern War: Why Ignorance Is Not Insight,” The British Army Review, 185 (Autumn 2023), 24-27. ↩︎